Marion Ball Director Of Computing at Temple University health science Center A 1961 graduate in mathematics from the University of Kentucky and received her MA in mathematics from the University of Kentucky in 1965 and Doctorate in Medical Education from Temple university in 1978. She taught High school Mathematics in Kentucky in 1961 after which she worked as a programmer in the Department of Behavioral sciences at the University as a programmer where she was involve in impetrating the first Pathology Clinical Laboratory system an IBM 1800 Data Acquisition and Control system until 1965.

In 1965 she and her husband Dr. John Ball accepted a position at Temple University in Philadelphia where she became director of Computing at the health Sciences center and wrote her first books on How to select a computer for the Pathology Clinical Lab and How to select a Hospital Information system. At the same time she also wrote her first children’s book entitles What is a Computer. This was followed by a second Children’s Book entitles Be a computer Literate and Using Computers in Nursing. Co authored e by Dr Kathryn Hannah. At Temple University she first held her academic appointment in the department of Family Practice and Medical Physics till 1984 and then as an associate professor in the department of medicine till 1985.

In 1980 she became President of the then Society for Computer Medicine and during her presidency it merged with SAMS to form AMSI. In the same year she became a fellow of the National Science Foundation. During this period she became active in the International Medical Informatics associate and at the Medinfo in Stockholm (then still working group 4 of AFHIP.) She was asked to serve as the program chair of the first Working group meeting on Hospital Information systems which took place in South Africa in 1979 and in 1983 she was the co editor with Jan Van Bemmel of the Medinfo proceedings.

In the early eighties She and Dr. Hannah stated the series in Healthcare informatics Series with Springer Verlag. In 1974 she was asked to serve on the (BLRC) Biomedical Library Research Committee of the National Library of Medicine and also served on the long-range planning committees (in medical informatics) formed by the new director of the NLM Dr. Don Lindberg who came in 1984.